Dan Andreescu
| Tags | Analytics, Big Data, Collaboration, Documentation, Open Source, Research, Third Parties |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning |
| Secondary Sessions | Embracing Open Source Software |
Our strategic goals include scaling our communities to a truly global level, and expanding our understanding of human knowledge. To do this, in my opinion, we need to have a much better understanding of our communities' actual work. We have tens of thousands of people doing millions of hours of work every month, and nobody knows exactly what is being done, what the definition of "done" is, and how fast or slow the progress is. We are the leaders of the free knowledge movement, and we are mostly blind except for some big picture notions like pageviews and edits. It is my opinion that we need to develop a good understanding of the work being done on the wikis. Very capable people have already spent lots of time trying to do this, but I believe we have largely failed because of technical limitations. This is a big data and big compute problem, and we have not yet approached it as such. A close collaboration between our communities, Analytics, Research, and Audiences teams is needed, as well as the power of the WMF Hadoop cluster. I have had sessions on this topic already, and am excited to finish planning and transition to actual work. There are some very valuable implications of taking on and finishing this work. Most importantly, we will all be able to more objectively talk about frustrations in the community over changes that cause "more work". For example, when we launched Visual Editor there was huge backlash about the amount of work this change implied for our community. But because this was largely based on subjective opinions, emotions got involved and it took years to calm the negative effect of those emotions. This effort would also give us, for the first time, a way to celebrate these millions of hours of work. People could see, share, and take pride in their part of building human knowledge (if they wanted to, privacy is of course one of our top priorities).
I am also interested in expanding our Open Source efforts, and examining changes that we can make to spur more collaboration. My reading of the strategic goals for 2030 is that the WMF will not have enough resources to execute by itself. That's where collaboration will be crucial, and where problems like in-house developed libraries without true Open Source presence will slow us down. We let documentation and third-party user support lag behind because we're busy with other stuff, and that's arguably fine for our scale so far. But this approach will not allow us to grow the way our Strategy is defined.
